Choosing field service software: a buyer's checklist for UK trades
Every field service platform demo looks good. They are built to. The difference between the one that sticks and the one you abandon after four months is almost never the feature list — it is whether the software matches how your engineers actually behave at eight o'clock on a wet Tuesday morning.
This is the checklist we would use if we were buying, written for UK businesses with VAT, CIS, gas and electrical certification and account customers to deal with.
Start with the job you do most
Do not evaluate on the exotic case. Take the job type that makes up the biggest share of your week and run it end to end in every system you trial: enquiry, quote, booking, attendance, parts, completion, invoice, payment.
If that path takes more clicks than it does today, no amount of reporting will make up for it. Your engineers will quietly stop using it and you will be back to paper.
Questions worth asking every vendor
- What happens when there is no mobile signal in a basement or plant room?
- Can an engineer raise and take payment for an invoice without ringing the office?
- How do certificates and job sheets get to the customer, and are they stored against the property?
- How are VAT and CIS handled, and can terms differ per customer?
- What does it cost when we add our seventh engineer, and again at fifteen?
- Who owns the data, and how do we get all of it out if we leave?
- Is support in the UK, and what are the actual hours?
Things that only hurt later
Some problems never appear in a demo because they only bite once you have real volume and real history in the system.
- Per-user pricing that jumps at a threshold just above your current headcount
- Long minimum terms with an auto-renewal clause
- Charges to export your own customer list
- Integrations that are 'on the roadmap' rather than live today
- Setup fees hidden as mandatory onboarding
Want to see what this looks like on your own jobs?
Test the phone side, not just the diary
Most trade work arrives by phone, so a system that manages jobs beautifully but ignores calls leaves the most expensive gap in the business untouched. Ask what happens to a call nobody answers, and whether you can tell which advert produced it.
If the phone system, the diary and the invoice live in three separate products, somebody in your office spends their day copying between them.
Run a real pilot, not a sandbox
Pick two engineers, one office person and two weeks of genuine jobs. Sandbox data proves nothing, because sandbox customers never ring back to argue about a price.
At the end of the pilot ask the engineers one question: would you rather go back? Their answer decides whether the rollout will succeed, whatever the spreadsheet says.
Plan the switch before you sign
Agree who cleans the customer list, what history is migrated, when the old system is switched to read-only and who trains the team. Migrations fail on housekeeping far more often than on technology.
Pick a quiet fortnight if your trade has one. Nobody should be learning new software in the first cold snap of the year.
Frequently asked questions
- How long does it take to move to a new system?
- For a small team with a clean customer list, days rather than weeks. The variable is data: the messier the existing records, the longer the tidying takes, and that work is yours to do whoever you buy from.
- Should I choose software built for my specific trade?
- Trade-specific paperwork matters — a heating engineer needs CP12s, an electrician needs certificates. What matters more is whether those documents can be produced and sent from site. A general platform that handles your certificates properly beats a niche one that handles nothing else well.
- What is a realistic budget?
- Compare the monthly cost against one job a month. If the software recovers a single missed call or prevents one second visit each month, it has paid for itself — which is why it is worth working out those numbers before you compare prices.